I'm Still Here (2024)
There's a moment early in I'm Still Here where the warmth of a family home, the laughter, the cluttered kitchen, the sun coming through the windows, feels almost unbearably fragile. You know what's coming. The film knows you know. And Walter Salles lets that dread settle in slowly, patiently, like a weight pressing down on your chest. That's the kind of filmmaking this is: deliberate, precise, and deeply felt.
Set during Brazil's military dictatorship in the early 1970s, the story follows a woman whose husband, a former politician, is suddenly and violently taken by the military regime. What follows is not a thriller in the conventional sense. There are no chase sequences, no dramatic courtroom confrontations. What there is instead is something arguably harder to watch: a woman navigating grief, bureaucracy, and institutional silence, rebuilding her family's life from the ground up through sheer force of will. It's a heavy premise, and the film earns every ounce of that weight.
Fernanda Torres is extraordinary here. I don't use that word lightly. She anchors the entire picture with a performance that never once tips into melodrama, even when the material is screaming at her to do so. There's a restraint to her work that makes the emotional gut-punches land all the harder. You feel everything she's not saying. It's the kind of lead performance that makes you understand immediately why it generated serious awards attention.
The craft surrounding her is equally impressive. The cinematography is genuinely breathtaking, capturing both the beauty of Brazil and the creeping menace of a society living under authoritarian rule. The soundtrack is evocative without being manipulative, and the use of authentic Super 8 footage is a masterstroke, giving the whole thing a lived-in, almost documentary texture that keeps pulling you back into the reality of what you're watching. This is a film that wants you to feel like you're witnessing something true, not just watching a dramatisation of it.
That commitment to gritty realism is both the film's greatest strength and, occasionally, its biggest obstacle. I've always thought films exist on a spectrum between escapism and reflection, and when they push too far towards one end, it can work against the experience. I'm Still Here leans hard into unflinching authenticity, which means it's also a very slow burn. There are long stretches of dialogue-heavy scenes where the narrative barely moves forward. For some viewers, that's going to be a lot to sit with. I won't pretend otherwise.
It reminded me strongly of Costa-Gavras's Z from 1969, that same suffocating institutional paranoia, the sense that the machinery of the state is vast and indifferent and almost impossible to fight. It's essentially a bureaucratic drama at heart, and proud of it. If you go in expecting urgency and momentum, you may come out frustrated. If you go in prepared for something measured and meditative, you'll likely find it deeply rewarding.
The film's structural decision to skip forward in time, first to 1996 and then to 2014, has divided opinion. I'm firmly in the camp that thinks it was the right call. Those jumps are essential to understanding the full weight of what the regime did to ordinary families. Decades of uncertainty, of fighting for acknowledgement, of demanding that the state simply admit what it did. Without those time jumps, the film would feel incomplete. The runtime is long, and I'd argue it could have been trimmed a little in the middle, but those final sections justify the journey.
If you've any interest in Latin American history and cinema, I'm Still Here sits alongside films like The Motorcycle Diaries as essential viewing, the kind of work that uses a specific, regional story to say something genuinely universal about power, resistance, and what ordinary people are capable of enduring.
It's a powerful, beautifully crafted piece of history. It honours the resilience of the human spirit without ever softening the brutality that made that resilience necessary. It won't be for everyone, and its pacing will test some patience, but I came away moved and glad I'd seen it.
Three and a half stars.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-07-06
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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